Barrel of Laughs

I always used to think that alcohol was a bit of a laugh. You can look back and laugh at some of the ridiculous situations that have occurred due to alcohol and, to be fair, some do seem quite funny. But are they? Is this just another way of covering up our stupid and destructive behaviour when drinking alcohol? Well, make up your own mind.

Alcohol stories tend to involve people making complete fools of themselves which turn into funny stories to be told over and over and over again. Over their drinking years people may only have about half a dozen alcohol stories anyway. The problem is that you hear them repeated again and again. Nearly all drinkers have at least one alcohol story up their sleeves; very rarely do they have more than half a dozen. It doesn’t really occur to drinkers that they have told the same stories for years, that they have drunk alcohol for years and can still only think of a few ‘funny’ alcohol related stories . Actually, they are alcohol bores. I know that I used to do this but then alcohol does destroy brain cells, so maybe I just forgot that I had told the same stories a thousand times before. But were they ever funny in the first place?

I woke up one morning when I was just seventeen to discover that the night before I had run stark naked through my mother’s house which was full of my

friends. I then went out into the middle of the road and tried to spin on my head. This was when break- dancing was all the rage. It was midnight and I was totally starkers. Funny? Well no, not really. I could easily have broken my neck and been confined to a wheelchair for life. Now that really would have made a funny story, wouldn’t it? I have told that story for years with the usual ‘Oh yeah, but guess what I did?’ beginning. The truth is that I didn’t remember a thing as I had a blackout . I have never forgotten the story simply because of the embarrassment that it caused me for years. Nearly, perhaps, as much embarrassment as the poor young man who woke up in the middle of the night to find himself halfway through urinating over his parents feet as they slept in their bed. He was only awoken by his mother’s screams and saw the look of sheer horror on his father’s face. He was just sixteen at the time and ran away from home because of the humiliation. Funny though, isn’t it?

For years I have told a ‘funny’ story about the night I stole (actually, borrowed for a little while) my uncle’s van and was too drunk to remember that I hadn’t yet learned to drive. I was in first gear all the way home. When I woke up, I remembered what had happened but couldn’t get the van back as I remembered that I couldn’t actually drive. When I looked at the van I could see that the front was smashed up and, as soon as I saw this, I began to experience flashbacks of the drive home. I remembered driving down a hill when a policeman tried to stop me by standing in the middle of the

road. I swerved to avoid him and hit a bollard. How I actually managed to get home is still a mystery.

‘Do you remember when I was so drunk that I fell asleep on the train and ended up in the middle of nowhere at seven o’clock in the morning with no money, cold and hungover? It took me all day to get home.’ Funny? ‘Do you remember when Peter drove the wrong way down a one way street and was too drunk to realise?’ Funny? ‘Yeah, but what about when Jill vomited in Nick’s lap at that dinner party?’ Hysterical? ‘Yeah, but I’ve got a better one. What about when Tom was handcuffed to a lamp post stark naked and left out in the freezing cold for hours?’ Hilarious?

There seems to be a real competition amongst drinkers to see who has the funniest alcohol story. I mean, you are just not a drinker until you have at least once forgotten where the toilet was and urinated in some outrageous place or vomited over your spouse’s parents . Or until you have fallen off a balcony and cracked a rib, dropped off to sleep on a bus or train that was meant to take you home and ended up in a field lying face down in a cow pat. What about the time you slept with somebody who you thought was the picture of beauty, only to realise the next morning that you have in fact just slept with the creature from The Hound of the Baskervilles! Ever got the boot from work because you were too hungover to go in, or because one too many at lunch meant fluffing your work or being rude to a colleague or client? Remember the times when you called everyone in your phone book at 3 a.m. in your drunken

and lonely state or fell asleep in the middle of having sex? Unless you have done at least one or maybe all of these you are just not a drinker. You see, drinkers try to justify their antics by turning it into a laugh whenever possible.

It’s funny how drinkers don’t sit around laughing about the arguments, the beatings, the violence, the abuse, etc. Frequently even the stories that were made into jokes were never funny in the first place as all too often there are consequences. The man who slept with the ‘dog’ from The Hound of the Baskervilles suddenly gets a phone call to say she is pregnant. The person who lost their way and ended up in a cow pat suddenly realises they have missed work again and have now lost their job.

Am I suggesting that I don’t find some of these alcohol stories funny or that I have lost my sense of humour? No. Of course some are funny but seeing somebody trip over is amusing too. I once watched a friend of mine go to look out of a window but, because it was so clean, he put his head straight through the pane of glass. This isn’t really funny but I can’t tell the story with a straight face. (He wasn’t hurt, in case you were wondering.) The point is that alcohol addiction is anything but a barrel of laughs. We laugh at some things that occur as a result of alcohol simply because they are about somebody who is out of control. The stories are simply part of the facade to justify drug taking. No doubt heroin addicts joke about how they once missed a vein and hit an artery. Funny? Or how they were so ‘out of it’ they

nearly choked on their own vomit. Funny? The thing about alcohol stories is that they are told by people who can barely recall the event themselves and are simply telling you what happened afterwards or what others have described.

One of the biggest advantages to being free is the ability to remember everything, every part, every second of this very precious life and always to be in full control with the knowledge that you are seeing everything with a …